HTC Desire 620G Review

I don’t know what to write about this phone anymore. I bought it solely because i thought it comes with full HTC Sense 6.0 now that i know, it doesn’t. There’s really not much difference left between this phone and HTC Desire 616. You can also compare it with Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime as it comes with a front 5 MP camera. But then again, it’s not really a selfie camera. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad camera. Its just it does not have the same features as a selfie camera. Even the octa core Mediatek MTK 6592 chipset isn’t that special anymore. As it is easily available in phones below 10,000 Rupees or approx $160 USD. Anyway for the extra price you are going to get HTC’s name and quality if nothing else.

Hardware

Like i said in my unboxing video. HTC Desire 620G looks like an exact replica of HTC Desire 820. From glossy plastic build to dual tone colours. Its build quality just like 820 is very solid. It is not a unibody phone though. The battery of this phone is removable. It is 9.6mm thick and weighs 160 grams. Believe it or not but this phone is thicker than HTC Desire 616. Not by much but still. One thing hardware wise which Desire 820 have but Desire 620G doesn’t is a Notification LED.

Display

HTC Desire 620G comes with 5 inch HD display whether it is IPS or TFT or SuperLCD type that is unknown. But one thing i can tell you is regardless of whatever type it is. It has got pretty good viewing angles and colour reproduction. It is not that bright though. Even at full brightness and automatic brightness off, it feels dull. Sunlight readability at full brightness isn’t that good either. Overall it is a pretty average display.

Multimedia

HTC Desire 620G does not have boom sound speakers. It is HTC’s clever placement of the speaker and ear piece which makes it look like it has boom sound speaker. It has only one speaker at the bottom. And the quality of that speaker is quite good. It’s pretty loud. The only issue i had with it, is its clarity. It creates a distorting noise sometimes while playing music at high volume. This phone’s music quality in earphones is not good at all. It feels pretty dull and lifeless. And even at full volume it doesn’t get that loud. And the worst part is it almost has zero bass. It does come with an equalizer so you can customize it but it wont affect the quality that much. Just like any other phone with the same chipset this phone can also play 1080p videos without any issues in its default player.

Camera

HTC Desire 620G comes with 8MP rear facing camera with touch to focus/auto focus both and LED flash. It also comes with 5MP front camera. The quality of both is quite ‘real’. Real as in it takes photo with pretty exact details like in real life. Especially its front camera. Most phones that comes with 5MP or more resolution front camera are considered as ‘selfie’ phones in this day and age. But this phone’s front camera does not take fake photos. It will capture your face as it is. It won’t make it shine. It does come with something called ‘beauty face’. You can use it if you want but don’t blame me if your photos come out looking abnormal because of it. All in all if you like Grand Prime’s selfie camera then you’ll probably wont like this one as it shows the reality. The back camera of this phone takes very good photos in good lighting conditions. But in bad light or low light the quality degrades a lot and it picks up a lot of noise and doesn’t pick up that much details or light. As you can see in the photos below. Both the cameras can take videos up-to 1080p a sample of which is in the review video below, the quality is not that good because the format is 3GP only.

From front camera

Good lighting

Bad light with flash

Bad/Low light

‘Gaajar ka halwa’ preparation

OS/RAM/Storage

It comes with Android version 4.4.2 with some kind of custom HTC Skin on top of it. It is not sense. This phone does not come with any sort Sense. If you know what i mean. Anyway, RAM of this phone is 1GB out of which you’ll get around 400MB free. And still the phone lags/stutter and gets stuck sometimes. Even during simple tasks such as copy pasting files from one folder to another it starts lagging. These random slow downs does not happen often they only happen during multitasking. This phone comes with 8GB of internal storage out of which you’ll get around 4.3GB free and here’s the interesting part it does not have move to SD or preferred install location function. Which means you are stuck with 4.3GB of storage for apps and games. At this point it feels like HTC actually made this phone worse than HTC Desire 616 which is available for much cheaper than this phone. This phone does support USB OTG.

Price To Performance Ratio

HTC Desire 620G comes with Mediatek MTK 6592 chipset which contains 8 Cortex A7 processors clocked at 1.7 GHz and Mali 450MP4 GPU. Looks quite decent. But here’s the thing. This chipset has become quite old now. Its performance is still pretty good when compared to similarly priced phones with Snapdragon chipsets. But when you compare it with other phones with the same chipset you’ll find that this phone looks expensive. They could’ve justified the price if they have given the full HTC Sense with this phone but they didn’t. So now its nothing different from any other phone with Mediatek chipset from local brands. Even the old HTC Desire 616 has the same chipset just underclocked to 1.4 Ghz but that didn’t affects its performance much. But its lower price could compensate for that. HTC Desire 620G doesn’t even have that.

Connectivity

The only thing you are going to miss out if you buy Desire 620G instead of Desire 620 is 4G. Apart from that it has all the rest of the connectivity option like dual SIM, 3G, Wifi, Bluetooth 4.0. WiFi of this phone is quite fast and doesn’t lose connectivity even if you leave it to download apps during all night. Call quality from both ear piece and mic is loud and clear. It also has cast screen option.

Battery

The battery of this phone is of 2100 mAh. It last up-to 7-8 hours on normal use and around 4-5 hours during gaming. It comes with an option to turn off the high frequency use of CPU when not needed to save battery life. But turning that option on could affect the performance of the phone. Although With that option on and brightness set to less than medium this phone can also last all day on very moderate use.

Verdict/Choice

Here’s the perfect example of choice. I bought this phone, i made a choice. I bought it solely because i thought it’s going to come with full HTC Sense 6.0 but now that it doesn’t. It does not have anything to differentiate itself from other phones with Mediatek MTK 6592 chipset. If i knew that this phone is not going to come with HTC Sense i wouldn’t have bought it. Because there’s already a phone like like that in the market it’s called HTC Desire 616. 5MP front camera and 8GB internal storage is not that much of an upgrade. Its not even a selfie camera. Those of you looking to buy this or Galaxy Grand Prime, beware that this phone’s 5MP front camera is not a proper selfie camera. It is not going to make you glow. Don’t blame me if you buy it and get scared by looking at your own ‘real’ face. You can buy this phone if you want an affordable HTC phone with 5MP front camera and decent performance than an average selfie phone. Otherwise you could find many smartphones with better or similar specs from local brands at much cheaper price. Choice will always be yours.

57 thoughts on “HTC Desire 620G Review”

Overall I think this is a decent phone. For those who really want this phone can always download those “beauty camera whatsoever” apps from the Playstore. Also, I’m surprised that it’s not Sense 6.0, or is it older version of the UI?

It’s not. If any HTC phone comes with any version of Sense then it has that mentioned on the box. Just like HTC Desire 616, this phone also comes with default Android Jellybean UI with a customized skin on top. More like just a customized homescreen and app drawer area while everything else is default Android. HTC Sense is also like a skin/theme but it is very deeply integrated in the OS/UI. Transitions/animations/toggles everything is very different in Sense.

Colour reproduction is good, it produces pretty neutral colours nothing too sharp. And pixels are unnoticeable unless you look for them intentionally. It has 294 Pixels Per Inch to be exact. For the rest read the display section of the review.

Design wise it’s good for one hand use and build quality is quite good too. It’s made of glossy but pretty solid plastic material so it’s pretty sturdy. It weighs only 160 grams.

All the phones with 5 inch display does indeed have screen size of 5 inches(measured diagonally) whether it has on screen buttons or not, that doesn’t matter. And on screen buttons are called on screen buttons for a reason. They are on screen so obviously they take up some screen space.

But while playing games or watching full screen videos or using any full screen app these type of buttons disappears automatically so no need to worry about screen space.

They disappear automatically all the time, unless you tap in the middle or swipe down from the notification bar. They won’t appear. In some games though, like GTA San Andreas these buttons don’t disappear.

It’s the same processor Mediatek MTK 6592. It’s just in Desire 616 it has been under clocked to 1.4GHz. It’s default clock rate is 1.7GHz. There’s really not that much difference in performance. I have used both. I can tell.

You could use any headphones/earphones you want, it really wouldn’t effect the music quality much because the issue is in the phone itself. If you want a phone with good music quality especially in ear phones. I would suggest you to not buy this phone. And i don’t know what this phone’s SAR value is, but i want to know why are you asking about SAR value? Are you worried about the radiation?

Hi, Jay !!! Thanks for this helpful review & yes i bit concerned about SAR values.In my opinion,low SAR value is definitely a plus feature for a mobile.Co.s like samsung & microsoft has dedicated urls on the internet for providing SAR Info for each & every phone they manufacture but i have not found any such info for htc products.You may provide this value by pressing *#07# on the phone or should be provided in a box.One more suggestion from your side, As i am looking for phone with decent specifications & price range of 14K-16k, should i go for grand prime or grand 2.Grand prime is having kitkat 4.4.4 but grand 2 has lot more features but it will soon get outdated as it is upgradable upto kitkat 4.4.2

For gaming there are not many choices in that price range. And by Chinese i guess you mean re-branded phones like from Micromax, Karbonn because Chinese companies like Gionee, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and even Lenovo are actually pretty legit and very good in quality.

Actually it’s the opposite. Snapdragon 400 inside Moto G Second Gen in general is very weak compared to Mediatek MT6592 inside HTC Desire 620G in terms of sheer raw power.

The only advantage Moto G Second Gen has is that it runs on vanilla Android. No customization what so ever. That gives it a slight edge in the OS department. But in terms of raw processing power, it’s Moto G second gen which falls short, not HTC Desire 620G.

hloo, i want to buy a phone and my range is 14.5k.
there is a phone gRand prime but my friends says that the has hanging problm.it goes slow down after 1 month,
can you please suggest me which one is best htc 620g or galaxy grand prime..
please tell me i’m very confused.

Any idea??? About getting lollypop for 620g ds.. any one… if .. when it is going to get… i think htc is the last one getting lollipop. Many of my frn didnt get their update even to kitkat. They’re still on ics and jellbean… bad experience! Very bad

This phone has scrolling menu.. its uneasy.. right now m using lollipop loader which gives it exact look like lollipop. And everyone wants to be updated till date …in my case it is not so special. Smwhr i read it that all medium range htc are getting lollipop soon but mediatek processor of this phone are being evaluated with lollipop. Taiwanese tech media in its release note says too that desire 620 & 620Gds both will get lollipop update for sure in future..

“Everyone wants to be updated”. Well count me out of your “everyone”. I stopped caring about Google Android updates after Gingerbread/Jellybean. The update cycle kind of got completed with Jellybean.

There’s literally nothing they have done in it since Jellybean and they simply can’t because there’s nothing left. There was a time when Android updates were actually needed, for example Eclair(2.1) didn’t have basic feature like hot-spot, which we got in Froyo(2.2) then Froyo was very slow and buggy which they fixed in Gingerbread(2.3). And after that all they have done are cosmetic updates to the UI and some tweaking behind the scenes.

Even custom ROMs were needed back then, because they could give you something that the default Android or the phone manufacturer couldn’t in the OS. Same example as before, i installed Cyanogenmod on my Xperia X8 just to get WiFi hotspot. But now you don’t actually need them ’cause a default Android version like Jellybean comes with everything you’ll ever need. Now, even custom ROMs are nothing more than cosmetic changes/themes.

If a phone comes with Android Lollipop out of the box, i would gladly take it. I have no problem with updates either. The problem is, stop thinking that you need them. ‘Cause you actually don’t. Stop thinking like “Everyone is doing this, so i should to”.

And it’s not up-to chip maker who gets the update and who don’t. It’s up-to the phone maker which is HTC in this case and they never update their lower mid-range phones. Especially the one with Mediatek chips. For instance, HTC Desire 616 has the same chip-set as 620G and it is still stuck at 4.2.2 Jellybean.

If you want Lollipop update just for the ‘looks’ then i am afraid there’s nothing much you could do other than what you are doing right now. I can give you one last advice though, Launchers make phone slow especially when data connection or WiFi is on. So, you should avoid them as much as possible.

I am having a problem .. i have inputted a 32GB memory card in it .. but all the files in the card and phone memory get corrupted after 5-6 days … music files give the notification that the format is not supported videos simpley give can’t play the video .. please please help … i’m suffering a lot and I don’t know much about phones …